TAMPA — Clint Frazier zipped through the Yankees clubhouse last week with an attendant in tow, en route to picking up a custom pair of Air Jordan Shadow 1s from the mailroom at Steinbrenner Field.
“They’re here!” he shouted as he jogged out the door. He’d been talking about them for days. As is often the case with Frazier, most people in his immediate vicinity know what’s on his mind.
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Frazier had bought two pairs of the black and grey classic Jordans. He had been wearing the first one during batting practice shortly after reporting to Tampa in late February. He sent the other off to Custom Cleats, Inc., to be fitted out with spikes so he could wear them in game action. Frazier dropped Adidas as a sponsor shortly after reporting to spring training because he wants the freedom to wear whatever type of sneaker-turned-cleats he wants, as long as they’re compliant under the Yankees’ uniform rules.
The Shadows are the test pair for the outfielder. He’s looking at a pair of black and white Jordan 5s, but he particularly dreams of wearing streetwear brand Off-White x Air Jordan 1s on the field. Those are the kicks he’s been rocking most of his mornings: The red, white, and black Js that are way more expensive than your typical classic 1s.
Soon enough he was lacing up his Shadows at his locker in the back corner of the clubhouse, debating between black laces or grey, preparing to pull his polyester pinstripes over the high-tops. The shoes fit the club dress code. They also fit Frazier’s dress code, a form of streetwear lite.
“I’ve always liked fashion but I never knew how to express myself the right way,” Frazier says. “It’s all about what you make of it and I think once i finally turned a corner on not really caring how people view me is when I started to get a little more comfortable with the things I wanted to wear.”
This is Frazier’s third big-league spring training and the third in which he’s working to find a balance between who he wants Clint the individual to be and who the Yankees want Clint to be. Two years ago he was introduced to most of the Yankees’ fanbase as the young kid who showed up to spring training with flowing red curls and an accidental infatuation with Mickey Mantle’s jersey number.
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This year, Frazier reported to camp with a pierced nose, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to wear it in-game. He hoped they’d let him wear a clear retainer at the park as cartilage piercings, especially recent ones, close up quickly. But even that was verboten.
Imagine a glove connecting with the small plastic bar holding the hole open on a stolen base attempt. Instead, Frazier emerges every day from the clubhouse bathroom with his nostril red and angry after he jams the stud back into the hole before heading home for the day.
(Andrew McCutchen had a nose piercing when he was traded to the Yankees last season; he was also not allowed to wear it during games.)
Frazier tries to walk a fine line with his public perception. His priorities appear at first to be in conflict with each other: Don’t focus so much on my personality over my play, but please understand that I have a different personality.
But it is more that he wants fans to see him as someone who is not a bad guy, accountable after making some dumb blunders, and that his persona doesn’t have to be incompatible with the goals of his work.
“People wanna talk about my personality or any kind of distraction that I bring upon myself rather than my game,” he says. “I have fun and I’m a vocal person, but I know I have to wear every bit of negativity when it comes my way. But I think it’s just about being myself.”
The early mistakes in his career have colored the way fans perceive him. In the outfield, he’ll often check the positioning cards the Yankees provide that he keeps in his back pocket. Fans who can’t see exactly what he’s looking at will yell at him to put his phone away during the game. It can be easily assumed most fans wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Aaron Judge or Brett Gardner were looking at their phone in that case.
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“I think that there’s no in-between,” Frazier says. “You either like me or you don’t.”
The truth is that Frazier wants you to like him. He says he wants to be a Yankee for life and he needs the fans on his side. He loves New York and he loves the energy Yankees fans bring to the ballpark. He became hooked once he was able to play in the Bronx in 2017.
“I’m trying to be myself while playing for a team that I feel like everyone in the world wishes they could play for,” he says.
Frazier notices a generational divide in how fans receive him. The younger generation, closer to his age, tends to find him relatable and interesting. The older generation tends to find him frustrating and with mixed-up priorities. Put differently: Tweet less, train more.
Frazier is, in a room full of jocks, a relative weirdo. He knows this to be the case, though he hopes at the end of the day he serves more as entertainment than distraction.
On a recent drive home from a spring game, Frazier carpooled with third baseman Miguel Andújar, a rambunctious youngster with a fantastic sense of humor.
“I like you because you’re stupid and funny,” Frazier says Andújar told him as they both laughed at the description. That’s good enough for him. Those first three words — “I like you” — are the important part to remember.
In the spring clubhouse, the people Frazier gravitates toward the most are guest instructors Reggie Jackson and Nick Swisher. He is curious about them. He looks up to them.
Jackson’s stature as a baseball legend, which he’ll never shy away from reminding you, has made an impression on Frazier as he’s searched for a relative analog. Frazier is not a baseball historian by hobby; while he’s far from the first rookie to ask for a retired Yankees number out of spring, Suzyn Waldman’s 2017 report about his request to wear number seven (which she intended as a cute story about a new kid in camp) put that lack of historical knowledge on full display.
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“I didn’t watch baseball at all growing up,” Frazier says. “I don’t know a lot of players from the past. I just played it.”
Frazier is far from alone in his lack of historical knowledge about the sport he plays. At the end of the day, most baseball players make it to the bigs because they are athletic freaks, not because they’ve logged the most re-watches of Ken Burns’ “Baseball.”
“I feel that I should be expected to know the people who stood on the old field before I did,” he admits.”It’s just about respecting the guys who were there before and guys like Reggie Jackson make that possible every day. It’s really cool seeing a guy like him walking around and knowing he played for the Yankees and I play for them now.”
Frazier’s watched the documentary “The Making of Mr. October” four times, he says. He knows Jackson’s history with the Yankees, how he refused to give up his personality and how he found enough of a balance between his playing ability and overall agitation to be invited back as an instructor year after year.
But Jackson sets a high bar for Frazier, or anyone really. He survived being a major pain in the ass, because to opposing hitters he was a major pain in the ass too.
Frazier has just 183 plate appearances in the majors thus far. He is now 24 years old and still searching for a regular major-league job.
He’s starting to realize that his mouth moved faster than his success, and it’s put him in a bind now where everything he does is under much more scrutiny than your average Triple-A outfielder.
“I only have five minutes in the big leagues but I have 100,000 followers on Twitter,” Frazier says. “That’s what’s made it hard because expressing myself has come at a cost. Sometimes you don’t realize how many eyes are watching you until you give them a reason to chirp at you.”
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He was mouthy back in high school, he says. He was a confident kid whose status as the star baseball player made him arrogant and obnoxious. His lessons were served hard, knocking him on his ass when his hairstyle was the first thing about him to make real headlines.
“I was lucky that 19-year-old me was in the Cleveland Indians organization where there wasn’t as much media,” Frazier says. “But I think 21-year-old me was over here and he still had some issues.”
“At 21 or 22 years of age I’m sure I was in a similar place,” Jackson says. “I’ve got a good relationship with him, and right now he’s in the process of learning who Clint Frazier is.”
A closer analog for Frazier to follow is Swisher, who he just missed playing with as a teammate in Scranton in 2016 by a few weeks.
Swisher is loud, bombastic, and always smiling. Frazier has less audible volume. He doesn’t have a catchphrase the way Swisher has “BRO!” But his loudness comes from his willingness to talk about what’s on his mind, while the rest of his teammates try to traffic in the opaque or generic and vague. Frazier is a writer’s dream in the Yankees clubhouse. He checks off the list of baseball cliches as well as anybody else, but he’ll tell you what’s really going on with him, whether it’s about a recent breakup or a pair of sneakers or a life-altering concussion and lingering symptoms.
Frazier and Swisher had a conversation recently in spring, with the elder of the two attempting to espouse some wisdom for the younger one before he departed from his spring stint.
But it was a conversation they had shortly after Frazier suffered his initial concussion in February 2018 that influenced him in his year of misery and recovery.
After banging his head against the left-field wall in Bradenton, Frazier was bored, in pain, and scared as he battled blurred vision, migraines and the inability to remember his cats’ names.
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Swisher recommended a documentary to him about a theory that positive thinking can become its own form of holistic healthcare.
“Heal” is a 2017 New Age film that promotes the creation of a “healthy inner environment,” a mindset derived from Buddhist principles that can heal a variety of chronic physical ailments.
At its most simple, the testimonials advise viewers to reconsider the impact of stressors on their immune system and overall physical state. Taken to its most extreme, the film brushes aside the entire concept of a physical being and instead encourages those suffering from chronic illnesses to focus on healing their emotional energy.
The message spoke to Frazier, who says he was “desperate” to climb out of the state of his post-concussive symptoms as the year went on.
Frazier felt, plainly, like crap all year.
“It was like I was hungover for a year straight,” he says. “And who wants to get out of bed when they’re hungover?”
He watched “Heal” many, many times, hyping himself up to get out of bed and walk around the verdant grounds at the University of Tampa while rehabbing with the Yankees’ affiliate there. He “flooded” his mind with positive thoughts as his sense of self waxed and waned with the severity of his post-concussive symptoms.
Frazier was smart last year. He told reporters on multiple occasions that he was not going to risk his future health just to get back on a field, even as he lost more and more at-bats in a year when ideally he would have been making a push for a consistent big-league job.
“It wasn’t about baseball so much as it was ‘When am I gonna wake up and feel like Clint again?’” he recalls. “I didn’t feel like I was myself for almost a year.”
Frazier began to feel like he was competing against his injury. He challenged himself to do the things that felt physically uncomfortable, hoping to numb himself to the pain of left-to-right movement. He shook his head for 30 seconds at a time to desensitize his vestibular system.
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Eventually he began to feel like Clint more days than not. When he was finally medically cleared in December, he danced in his hotel room in Pittsburgh, relieved to finally be able to tell everyone he knew he was back.
“I kinda kept that stuff internalized for as long as I could, but I wanted to let everybody know I’m back,” Frazier says. “I was gone for a little while, but I’m good. I’m ready to play. Let’s do this.”
So far, spring training hasn’t gone how Frazier had hoped. Having missed the majority of potential playing time last year and only being cleared to hit three months ago, rust is to be expected. But it’s ill-timed yet again. Spending time in Scranton for the fourth year in a row awaits him. He knows this is a likely outcome.
In early February, he said as respectfully as he could that he was trying to take Brett Gardner’s job. It’s one of those baseball things everybody knows but no one says, except him.
But Frazier is realistic about the prospect of getting a major-league outfield job.
“I have to earn that right on the Yankees,” he says. “And the guy who’s been there the last 10 years in the spot that I want has done everything possible to keep himself in that spot. I’m trying to follow in the footsteps of people like him.”
Frazier says the most important thing for him now is just getting more reps at the plate. Whether that’s in Scranton or in the Bronx, he just wants consistent playing time again.
“I know what I can do,” Frazier says. “It’s just a matter of getting my feet wet again and feeling comfortable in the box and going out and playing. It’s a tough game so for me to talk all the stuff that I talked I’ve gotta go out there and back it up, too.”
In the meantime, he wants to finally find the balance between expressing himself as he sees fit and not giving away any more reasons to chirp at him.
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“I’m a lot different from that wannabe tough guy that I give off on the field,” Frazier admits.
He doesn’t take pleasure in causing controversy, but he usually feels entitled to toe the line.
“I wanna be myself. I wanna express myself,” he says. ”If I’m gonna be the best player I can be, I have to be comfortable in the environment I’m in. I feel the most comfortable I’ve felt in a long time, and I really feel like I’m a part of this team. People just wanna win, so as long as you’re not a negative distraction, I don’t think expressing yourself is really an issue.”
(Top photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
